“It won’t cost anything—less, actually, than staying here. Peggy’s underwriting it so all we have to do is get there and the rest—room and board, three meals a day, prepared by the hotel staff—is all free. Tim says he’ll give me a scholarship. What do you think?”

Her face, sans makeup, showed the nicks and creases of time, the fine striations at the corners of her eyes, a pale rectangular scar pressed into her cheekbone and another just under her left ear, souvenirs of her girlhood in upstate New York. She grimaced and it all flattened in the light through the kitchen window. “I think you’re nuts,” she said. “What about my job? What about the apartment? What about Corey?”

And now he called up the lines he’d rehearsed in his head, how the experience would broaden Corey’s perspective and contribute to his language skills, how Rick Roberts was bringing his two kids and Royce Eggers too—he had three, didn’t he? And Tim’s kids, of course. It would be like a mobile classroom, really. And fun—a real summer break, for once.

“What about my mother?”

“We’ll see her when we get back. And we’ll go to the shore next year, okay, I promise—it’s not as if we haven’t been there every summer for as long as anybody can remember . . . but don’t you see, this is the chance of a lifetime.”

She looked dubious. Looked the way she had when he’d applied to Harvard, when they’d pulled up their roots in New York and moved here towing a trailer behind the car, and it wasn’t as if she was trying to hold him back—she wasn’t like that, not at all—just that she was cautious. And so was he. More cautious, really, than she was. And he’d already made up his mind.

“What about the car?” she said. “It’s a long trip, isn’t it? How many miles—thousands? And you really mean we’re going to accept charity from whoever—Peggy Hitchcock? That’s one thing we’ve always agreed on, right—never be beholden to anybody?”

He waved her objections away. “You’re just making excuses. We could take the train, put the furniture in storage, anything—if there’s a will, there’s a way.” He was watching her, the fork poised, the eggs congealing, each successive thought sparking in her eyes till he could see Mexico taking shape there, palm trees, beaches, margaritas.

Her voice was small, ruminative. “I don’t want to be beholden.”

“So don’t be. We can pay our own way.” He was standing at the sink, sipping coffee, his headache dissolving on the ascent of the caffeine. “Though even at fourteen-forty a day it’d be a stretch, I admit it—but we’ll save on rent. And groceries. And what, utilities?”